Well, finally. Time to discuss my favourite travel book of all (at least, my favourite of those I have read over the last year). It was the title that caught my eye when browsing down at the Sunnyside Branch of the Ottawa Public Library: 12,000 Miles in the Nick of Time: A Semi-Dysfunctional Family Circumnavigates the Globe (2003). Hmmm, some parallels here possibly, I thought. Author Mark Jacobson is an established journalist who is known for his humour and insight. He is a staff writer at the Village Voice and writes for publications like Rolling Stone, Esquire, and New York so clearly he has the writing chops to turn out a good book. And this book does not disappoint. It is a very honest, very funny (in his wry way), and philosophical account of his family's three-month journey to the "great places" of the world including the Angkor Wat in Cambodia, the Pyramids in Egypt, the ancient Hindu city of Varnasi in India, Petra in Jordan and the Holy City of Jerusalem. His motivation for the trip? His three children, ages 9, 12 and 16, had become "prisoners of the idiot culture, which seemed a terrible waste of perfectly fine DNA." Read on:
"Like Moses, I would lead my children from pop bondage. Because it wasn't enough to sit around congratulating ourselves because Rosie's school was Russian and Billy's class list contained names like Omar, Juan, Natasha, and Amidou. Brooklyn was full of names, multi-kulti hues; that's why we liked living there. But in the U.S. of A. everything was just a matter of time. With each passing moment it mattered less which far-off land these kids came from. They were playing Wrestlemania 2000 and collecting Pokemon cards like everyone else. Their parents were probably doing the same.
This is what I told the kids. Nothing less than the transference from the realm of childhood to moral, intelligent adults was at stake. Every nanosecond spent under the spell of the corporate "them" was not only making us stupider and more provincial but also more secure in that stupidity and provinciality.
For inspiration, I turned to Montaigne, especially his essay "On the Education of Children." The fact that Montaigne lived in the sixteenth century, before teenagers were even invented, and that he had no offspring of his own, mattered little. When attempting to enlighten a child, Montaigne said, "it was sheer motion that allowed for absorption of what could not be gleaned standing still." This was the true purpose of "going around". It "stretched the imagination" by allowing the traveller to experience himself or herself as not only "seer of foreignness" but also as "the foreign." This was the real path to knowledge, "the chance to rub up against others . . . to rub and polish our brains through contact."
The "rubbing against", the "polishing of brains", this was the Trip Manifest, the highly focused Vision Quest behind the decision my wife and I made to take the family, and most of the money we had in the bank, to go around the world." (p. 26).
When I first began reading this book, I wondered if Jacobson was just trying to be humorous or if he really was nuts. Actually, he seems to be both funny and a little bit nuts, which is realistically, probably the only way to get through life incurring the least amount of damage.
There is an interesting theme throughout the book that centers around his relationship with his 16-year-old daughter, Rae. She interjects her own commentary at various points in the book in a section called "Talkback/Backtalk". Her observations on her family, and on her experience of being dragged, kicking and screaming, away from her teenage friends at home, are priceless. There is definite tension in the family, which Jacobson neither tries to hide or simply laugh off. In the end, they do learn alot, they do come closer together, but it's an on-going process. When he asks them at the end of the book if they ever want to go around the globe again as a family, there are no takers. They tell him to go eat some Indian food if he's desperate for a little weirdness and leave them out of it. Ouch!
Another hilarious recurring theme throughout the book is Jacobson's references to the "travelling Wilsons", a family blog he stumbles across in his trip research. I could completely relate to his insecurity around the whole issue of parenting . . . had they done right by their kids? Could their children have reached greater potential had they only just done this or that, or not done this or that ? Would they make the most of The Trip? Below is one of my favourite passages in the book - the Jacobsons pop into a cyber cafe in Thailand and check out the Wilsons' latest blog. I'm ashamed to admit I found secret pleasure in disliking the Wilsons along with him . . .
"I checked out the website of The Wilsons, my new arch-enemies: "the fantastic Wilsons", we'd taken to calling them. They were going on a similar trip to ours, albeit on a somewhat more grandiose scale. A pair of doctors and their three brilliant towhead children, they had dropped out of the "rat race" and were already into their sixth month of traveling. There were other families who had done the same, and even written books about it, but they traveled in Land Rovers, with a full complement of porter/nannies. The Wilsons eschewed such easily lampooned amenities. Obviously a heartier, bolder crew, The Wilsons planned to stay away for "a year, maybe two." This we knew from their website, which they scrupulously maintained from the road, complete with digital photos of their tanned and marvelously blond offspring climbing the Mount Bromo volcano in Indonesia and throat-singing with Tuvan yak herders.
There was no need for The Wilsons to get home in time for school. The Wilsons were homeschooling, or as they so cleverly referred to it, "home away from home schooling." It was "better" that way, said Tom, the levelheaded but warmhearted dad and webmaster of the clan (although everyone got a chance to do their postings, so it was possible to follow the altogether engrossing musings of your favourite Wilson). The Wilsons had "always" homeschooled, Tom wrote. Traveling was simply part of the program. To them, "life was the curriculum". The Wilson kids never whined about the "quite rigorous" homework he gave them, Tom wrote. They were "two to three grade levels" ahead of where they would have been if they'd stayed home.
According to the most recent entry, they'd just reached the Seychelles, where they planned to "cool out" for a while. Wendy, the mom, planned to use the time to finish the quilt she was making of the various materials she'd gathered on their journey. "What else would someone do on an island in the middle of the Indian Ocean but finish a Yankee quilt," Wendy noted, with wry humour. Those Wilsons, they sure were fantastic. Who else but them would think of folding hundreds of origami ornaments to stick on a baby palm tree after hitting Bali on Christmas?
Where we dreamed of going, The Wilsons went; what we dreamed of doing, The Wilsons did. The Wilsons were the real us, the us of our dreams. If only we could be more like them, bring out our inner Wilsonness. We could homeschool. I could set aside a room in the house. That would be the learning lab. The children would look forward to our many hours in that hallowed sanctum, the lot of us falling in love with the most marvelous works our species has yet produced. Over time we would cease to see ourselves as this scuffling little scrap of humanity, cut off and alientated from life's mortal core. We would become powerful, paragons of human feeling, walking advertisements for true family life.
Fat chance. As soon as I mention homeschooling, the kids begin to roll their eyes and make jokes about hording cans of tuna fish in the basement, as if I'm signing them up for the Branch Davidians. Besides, did any of us really want to spend that much time together? There was no escaping it. We were not The Wilsons. We didn't have their rigor, their vision, their website.
Then again, it could all be lies. There were alot of lies on the Internet. Every day formerly rational people like Pierre Salinger were floating a harebrained theory some idiot believed. Maybe the Wilsons weren't so wonderful. Maybe they were staying in Hiltons or Oberois. Had whole armies of bearers whom they undertipped. Maybe the Wilsons never left home at all. They could be nothing but a bunch of bad-toothed ex-hillbillies, living in a tract house south of Chattanooga, or maybe just the dream obsession of one nutty recluse, not a family at all.
Either way there was no use getting all bent out of shape about it. The Wilsons were the Wilsons, we were us and there was not much to be done about it, I told myself, logging off the website." (p. 67).
What a scream. I think I would rather travel with the Jacobsons, in all their neurotic imperfection, than The Wilsons any day. So there you have it - my favourite family travel book of all, for what it's worth. Five stars.
